The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to a boot image discovery and delivery system for booting an information handling system.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Initial start-up procedures for an IHS generally include bootstrapping or booting-up the IHS. During a boot-up, a program, such as a basic input/output system (BIOS), initializes and tests hardware, peripherals, external devices and starts-up the IHS operating system (OS).
FIG. 2 illustrates block diagrams of several prior art boot image discovery architectures for use with an information handling system, where the boot image information is stored either in the host BIOS, a network interface card (NIC) option read only memory (ROM) or on a centralized dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server, which associates boot images to the physical media access card (MAC) address of the host, as should be readily understood by a person having ordinary skill in the art. See option 1, 130, option 2, 132, option 3, 134 and option 4, 136. In other words, prior storage solutions for internet small computer system interface (iSCI) boot of diskless hosts (e.g., servers or clients) perform host to boot image association based on the unique physical ID of the host, typically a MAC address, of the NIC port.
In these prior solutions, the location of the boot image is either stored in the persistent (non-volatile) storage in the host BIOS or in the Pre-OS code download through pre-boot execution environment (PXE), which is used to boot-up the client machine. These solutions do not support provisioning images for a logical user or a group of users.
Because boot image location is stored on the host or known to the host via the code downloaded from PXE, these solutions do not customize (e.g., update hardware drivers, update OS boot configuration and etc.), the image dynamically based on the host platform hardware.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved boot image discovery and delivery system absent the disadvantages discussed above.